Editor’s note: During the Spring 2026 semester, Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) will highlight examples of survival, contemplation, competition, protest and learning in their exhibition, “Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections.”
Curated by six faculty members from the Hesburgh Libraries and featuring pieces housed in six of RBSC’s distinct collections, “Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections” showcases the universality of constructing community and cultivating hope across time and place.
Throughout the semester, the Hesburgh Libraries website will feature news articles about each of the six faculty curators, providing insight into the stories behind their individual exhibits. Previously, we featured stories about the exhibits “A Community of Learners in Colonial America and the Early Republic,” “The Gay Olympic Games: Community Through Sport,” and “Ireland’s Idealized Community.”
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The poster, printed four decades ago in black and white, features a child’s face and the words “Stop bombing El Salvador” in bold.
“It’s simple but powerful,” Payton Phillips Quintanilla, Latin American and Iberian Studies curator and librarian, said. “You feel like you're falling into it. You find yourself next to this child, fearfully searching the skies.”
Commonly associated with the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), the image would have been a familiar sight during the mid-1980s among activists protesting U.S. support for El Salvador’s military during the Cold War era.
In Rare Books & Special Collections, the poster is just one of the visuals in Phillips Quintanilla’s exhibit, “Transnational Communities of Resistance during El Salvador’s Civil War.” The installation is one of six that comprise Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections.
The display gives visitors the opportunity to better understand a part of Cold War history often overlooked. While the Cold War is commonly framed around tensions with the Soviet Union, U.S. anti-communist policies extended well beyond the Iron Curtain. Still, discussions of this period often neglect or oversimplify the United States’ role in Central America.
Phillips Quintanilla said the exhibit materials were created by Salvadoran activists and solidarity allies working both within El Salvador and the United States.
“They were trying to educate the public about the histories and realities of U.S. intervention in Central America, including the role of U.S. tax dollars in funding and training of El Salvador’s military, in spite of its widespread and well-documented human rights abuses,” she said. “The goal was to put pressure on the U.S. government to end its role in the conflict.”
Throughout the spring semester, Phillips Quintanilla incorporated materials from the same collection as the exhibit pieces into class instruction. With striking graphics and colors, the installation offers insight into a lesser-known part of Cold War history, using materials that could easily have been lost to time.
“I think seeing the ephemera has been really impactful,” she said. “Some students have told me that they are learning about this particular history for the first time through a flier, pamphlet, button, or brochure created long before they were born. They are learning from these objects in the same way someone would have back in the 1980s.”
In the display, visitors will see a poster featuring a white bird sitting on a rifle, with vivid reds and blues; it stands in contrast with the stark black-and-white “Stop bombing El Salvador.” The display also features a variety of buttons with slogans such as “U.S. out of El Salvador”; a tri-fold pamphlet promoting a National Week of Solidarity and Action with El Salvador; a flier for a solidarity march and mass; and a bumper sticker, informational brochure, and bilingual bulletin.
“It’s kind of amazing that these have survived—this is paper, and paper degrades and gets damaged,” she said. “These are things that would have been handed out on the street or on campus, at community gatherings or in places of worship. They could have been thrown away, yet someone thought to keep and care for them. Because they have survived, we can learn from them, here and now.”
As visitors look at the items on display in the exhibit and learn more about the history they represent, Phillips Quintanilla hopes to inspire them to reflect on the types of physical and digital ephemera they create and encounter every day.
“I think ephemera is really powerful,” she said. “Preserving these materials signals their status as historical objects. In this case, it also reminds us not to lose sight of the sense of urgency, the life-and-death stakes, in the context of their creation. I hope when people see them, it makes them think about the ephemera they value in their own lives today, and recognize the power it may hold for future students and scholars.”
“Cultivating Community: Stories from Special Collections” is generously supported by the McBrien Special Collections Endowment. The exhibition is open to the public and will remain on display in 102 Hesburgh Library, Rare Books & Special Collections, through June 15.